Today we’d like to introduce you to Cody Messner
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I grew up in rural Holmes County Ohio. A small community farm town, with the largest amish population in the world. The town I grew up in only had one stop light, and one business. I was close with my family and spent a lot of time playing with my brother growing up, and we are still close today. From a young age, I enjoyed the outdoors, and animals. Around ages 6-7 I got involved in physical fitness. I wanted to be strong, and enjoyed training in the living room, while I watched cartoons, mainly dragonball z. I kept training and progressively making my workouts more difficult over the years and kept getting better and better. Through school, I also was in Boy Scouts, where I reached Eagle, and played school sports, (baseball, basketball), also I personally like to brag about my 11 years of perfect attendance and only missed 1 day, for an appendix surgery lol.
After high school, I went to college at the University of Akron, where I double majored marketing and sales, where I graduated with honors in 2015. During college I acquired a job working with developmentally disabled adults, where I still work part time, and have been there for 12 years now. While in college, I was torn between what I wanted to do, part of me wanted to purse powerlifting because I was at a high level. I was deadlifting only 10lbs under the world record at the time for my weight class, with bad form, and poor nutrition. So I knew I had a lot of room to grow, and at the same time, there was practically no money to be made in powerlifting, so I also wanted to pursue business, and work for marketing creating commercials for companies.
One of my roommates at the time, was into social media, and told me about “influencers” and how fitness was becoming big on Instagram, and encourage me to start posting content online.
So I did that, and over the course of the last 7 years my account and social presence has grown and grown. And now I’m able to not only train full time, like I wanted to do as a kid, but I can also create commercials for business, and advertise for them like I wanted to do as a adult career. . I didn’t realize this until one day, I was playing volleyball with some old friends from high school. And one of them pointed out that, I’m literally living out what i considered to be my dream life when I was in younger.. and I realized how blessed I was in that moment.
I’ve taken the last year to find myself and grow closer God. Philippians 4:13
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Like any road, it will have its bumps and places where things fell apart. I went through several different injuries in the course of my lifting career. None, that needed surgery or that stopped me, but many that deterred me. The powerlifting meet, I planned to break the world record in, I got into a head on car crash 3 days before that meet, (Wasn’t my fault)..but it left me pretty beat up, and I could not preform to maximum ability. and after that competition, all of the damage caught up to me, and I suffered a severe lower back injury that took my deadlift from 575lbs down to 225lbs for several months, and is ultimately why I switched from conventional to sumo deadlift.
Also deaths in the family are always a major set back. Anytime a person or a pet, passes is always a struggle. Nothing is harder than losing someone you love.
trying to run your own business and wear all the hats, is always a struggle. Lol.. When you’re a soloprenure there’s a lot of boxes to check off each month to make sure you survive. But thats also what makes it fun.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
For the last 12 years I’ve kept my part time job working for The Society in Medina, Ohio. There I am responsible for caring for 6 individuals with some form of cognitive disability. Giving them their medications, giving them showers, cooking their meals, taking them on outings into the community, exercising with them, dealing with occasional aggressive behavior and basically doing anything they need of us. I view my job, as trying to make the people I take care of as happy as possible, while helping them grow and learn.
I also create social media content, On Instagram, Tiktok, and Youtube where they pay me for view, and where I can acquire brand deals, and paid promotions from business’s for promoting them on my page.
I also train people either online or in person.
and I enjoy crypto trading which ive been doing since 2017
Alright, so to wrap up, is there anything else you’d like to share with us?
Love God with all your heart, And Love you Neighbor as yourself.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cody.messner/?hl=en
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Cody.messner
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@cody_messner?lang=en
